I am developing a website that has a drop-down menu at the top of it. The Menu has around 100 links in it that are repeated on every page. Every page also has some number of links below the Menu that may or may not be in the menu itself.

My issue is that Google says they generally don't like pages with more than 100 links on them.

Is there any way to change the links on the menu so that they no longer "count" towards my max of 100 links? It seems like there should be an easy way to do this but their really doesn't seem to be. the rel=nofollow still counts towards the number of links on the page at least according to Google, so what other options do I have?

I looked into where the 100 comes from and I found that it used to be here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#2 but that is no longer the case. I found a more definitive and frankly muddier answer here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru from Matt Cutts from 2007.

Long story short, in 2007 they still felt 100 links was a good number but they stated you could go far beyond that. In fact, they said that pages with high PageRank could have 2-300. It did sound like having many links could reduce the PageRank of the page with all of the links or possibly all of the items linked to.

Also, I know IIS7's SEO 1.0 toolkit suggests that pages should have no more than 250 links.